Using a fairly flat picture plane, Ramer uses an array of muted colors to depict a rural scene in Duchess County (mountains in the background may be the Fishkill range). The composition is balanced between an aging tree at left, a windmill at right.…
Flash Gordon was a comic-strip hero dating to 1934, created by King Features to compete with the successful Buck Rogers series. It ran until 2003 under various artists, for our purposes including Emanuel (Mac) Raboy between 1948 and his death in…
In a small, virtually unfurnished shack three people receive the titular sharecropper—two women and an elderly man, perhaps his father. Raboy’s possible allusion to the Prodigal Son’s return, however, is a sad moment: highlighted at the center of…
Emanuel (Mac) Raboy began his early professional life working in the Federal Art Project's Graphic Art Division, spanning the second half of the 1930s. His high-contrast wood engravings, dramatically composed subjects, expressive bodies, and social…
This vividly colorful painting has a lot going on. As with Preachen’s “Still Life on a Balcony,” space is radically discontinuous here: flowers, table covering, fields, and sky each occupy their own flat plane; the dark brown stoneware pitcher…
In its objects, archictecture, and visual style, this painting gestures back to earlier centuries of allegorical still lifes. On this side of an ornate railing, the seeming bounty is undermined by intimations of suffering (gladiolus), overconsumption…
A vividly colored grouping avoids any appearance of symmetry or regularity of shape—even a painted plate isn’t circular. Likewise, mottling seems part of Preachen’s design as if to demonstrate that beauty can be irregular. Reds and oranges dominate…